the thing that gets me the most about the USian attitude towards urban development is the, like, defeatism of it all, oh we...
bronzeagegattaca-deactivated202:
the thing that gets me the most about the USian attitude towards urban development is the, like, defeatism of it all, oh we could never have amsterdam or hamburg or florence here; like you do realise those places are not naturally occurring features of geography like the grand canyon and the niagara falls, right? you do realise they were built by humans and there’s nothing in the laws of physics that says on your continent you have to build fucking los angeles or houston instead? or are you saying that the united states people are just too dumb and incapable? is that really what you think?
I have been going a bit ~marxist on this one recently in that city planning is on some level, inherently, about building collective value and resolving tragedies of the commons, and combined with the US’s broken local governance system building new cities in the age of financialization of real estate assets doomed the whole project.
Its critical that Canada, while better than the US, *also* kindof sucks about urban design as Not Just Bikes will tell you in extensive detail and is way behind Europe or Japan. Its not just the specific US governance insanity (though, that really really doesn’t help), its a wider story of what the ‘new cities’ were able to build in the halcyon post-war era that locked themselves into awful equilibriums in the modern era. (China is its own complex story, but its oft-awful city design making so many similar US-style mistakes is also suggestive)
If Amsterdam had filled in all its canals and built highways over them - which it planned to do in the 60′s!! - I wonder if there is a tipping point it would have passed, just as an example.
But this is certainly a book-level topic with way more going on that just this.
Can you clarify what you mean by ~Marxist? Seems odd given that you group America, China, and Canada to contrast with Japan & Europe
Partially I am just being flippant, but the other part being that China, America, & Canada in relation to Europe + Japan have made residential real estate relatively more of a financial asset than a useful good - building patterns, city design, etc, caters to the notion that the purpose of city planning is to build housing who’s real estate values go up so they can be sold at a later date for a higher value. When that is your goal things that *cannot* be sold, aka the public infrastructure that makes dense city design functional, is underprovided, and the kind of housing you build is skewed. Referring to this as ‘marxist’ is just a kindof-cute way of pointing out how the economic structure is dictating the urban design, historical materialism baby.
Of course as also mentioned this is just a piece of it, its also contingent on a bunch of other things (real estate in Europe is oft financialized now! But maybe less so at critical moments in building modern city governance, like pre-1980′s UK?). And China of course is its own case, combining a massively financialized hypercapitalist real estate market with government-mandated investment and growth targets propping up their flagging export-oriented economy. Since civilization happens in cities urban design is impacted by pretty much all aspects of civilization, everything is its own case, but there are wider historical forces amoung the details.
Amsterdam and Hamburg and Florence grew in a feudal system where all the land in a city – and certainly in a neighborhood – might originally belong to one person, who often was the local government, this isn’t a dynamic available to America